Explorer program ends Jan 19

Glass leaves Google X labs, team will report to Nest CEO Tony Fadell

Google Glass is growing up. On Thursday, Google confirmed that it is planning to take its computerized eyewear product out of the experimental Google X unit. Instead Glass will be its own division, and Google Glass head Ivy Ross will report to Nest CEO Tony Fadell.

Tony Fadell is famous for contributing to the birth of the iPod at Apple. He landed at Google after the company bought Nest, his smart home startup, in 2014 for $3.2 billion. Glass isn’t joining Nest, but the team will report to Fadell — which is the biggest expansion in Fadell’s role since he joined Google.

In the short few years that Google Glass has been available, it’s clearly been a kind of beta test. Google has called its beta testers “explorers,” and with a $1500 price tag, Glass has generally been too expensive and experimental for mass consumption.

Google

Recently, worries about the platform’s future have led a few major developers, like Twitter, to abandon their Glass apps. Google says that a future version of Glass is on its way, possibly powered by an Intel chip. But Google didn’t provide a timeline, beyond that it will “launch when it’s ready.”

Google X is overseen by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and its offices, according to a 2013 article in Businessweek, are not on the main Google campus.